"The Ubuntu development community announced today the availability of Ubuntu 10.04 alpha 2, a new prerelease of the next major version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution. This alpha is the first Ubuntu release to completely omit HAL, a Linux hardware abstraction layer that is being deprecated in favor of DeviceKit."

The lack of commercial developer support has more to do with Linux having too many incompatibility issues between distros and software management systems that are designed around open source applications.

This is completely wrong. While Linux has a bigger market share than the iPhone, the average iPhone user is much more willing to pay money for some junk game than the average Linux user. Thus, the iPhone market is bigger.

Games on Linux basically never have to worry about incompatibilities if they do things correctly. All they have to do is statically link and use SDL and OpenGL. A game really shouldn't depend on much more than that. You are correct however that it is hard to develop a commercial desktop app using Gtk+ or Qt. But games shouldn't need to do that.

The fact that there are small indie games such as World of Goo that manage to release Linux ports with relative ease tells me that large companies like EA with 1000x the resources should have no problem with it. It is just a matter of market share. I would love to see more commercial software supporting Linux, but I really don't blame them at all when the market is so small.